TORONTO — Patric Hornqvist’s got no goals to show for this early stage of the NHL season, but he does have a baseball-sized knee bruise to show for a routine practice.
Also, he couldn’t care less about either.
To the latter, he was briefly felled by a Kris Letang slap shot during a power-play drill Friday afternoon at the Coca-Cola Coliseum, home of the AHL’s Marlies, where Mike Sullivan put the Penguins through a spirited 40-minute session. It looked frightening for a few seconds but, Hornqvist being Hornqvist, he was back on his feet within a minute, back into the same drill within two.
“You OK, Horny?” Sullivan would bark down the ice as the drill resumed, knowing full well he’d get no reply beyond maybe a grunt.
When the coach, indeed, got no reply, everything just proceeded as planned.
As for no goals through a half-dozen games …
“Nah, you know, you can’t worry about that. None of us can,” Hornqvist was telling me after treatment. “What’s important is how we all have to play. If you play the right way, those goals will come. This game was a big game for us, a great start to the road trip for us.”
By “this game,” of course, he meant the 3-0 throttling of the Maple Leafs the previous night, a performance so dramatically different from what preceded it that it might as well have resulted from a roster transfusion.
“I told everyone, even before we left Pittsburgh, this road trip came perfectly for us,” he continued. “We hadn’t played our best, and now we have a chance to come out here on the road and become a better team.”
And by “better team,” of course, he meant the one we just witnessed. The one that invested more into the first period Thursday than in the first five games combined. The one that applied all its natural speed, skill and savvy with a healthy dose of grit — hits were 30-21, blocked shots 22-7 — and it all ran 18 skaters and 60 minutes deep.
Hornqvist’s always been my go-to on grit matters, and he’d certainly be that after this particular effort, one in which he was moved onto a makeshift line with Matt Cullen and Riley Sheahan midway through the first period and, because they were so effective, wound up getting double-shifted over parts of the second and third.
They didn’t remain intact for this practice, which saw the following lines and pairings:
Guentzel-Crosby-Rust
Hagelin-Malkin-Kessel
Simon-Brassard-Hornqvist
Cullen-Sheahan-Sprong
(Grant)
Dumoulin-Letang
Maatta-Oleksiak
Johnson-Riikola
(Ruhwedel)
That put everyone, notably Hornqvist and Daniel Sprong, back where they were to start the Toronto game.
So, I asked Sullivan: What exactly was his thinking behind creating and deploying that line as he did? And does it now go back into a vest pocket or something?
Hm. That’ll be interesting to monitor. Because it basically gives Sullivan the option to show opponents different looks with the same personnel, even within the scope of the same game. This much is certain: The players involved had one heck of a good time together.
“That was fun,” Hornqvist said. “Cully and Riley are great players, and we were able to work together to put a lot of pressure on their guys.”
“Good times,” Cullen told me. “Anytime you can apply pressure, work down low, keep the puck away from the other team, you’re out there having a good time, believe me.”
How good?
“Oh, we’re talking on the bench, pumping each other up,” Sheahan said. “Cully and Horny did a great job, and it was a lot of fun. And then you just try to keep it going, shift after shift. It’s a good feeling when you’re going out there again and again, that confidence you get from the coaches.”
In the interim, Hornqvist apparently will play again with Derick Brassard and Dominik Simon, a line that’s shown precious little to date. Or it’ll get switched up.
Regardless, don’t expect his focus or approach to change. Some players, when slumping, will try pumping pucks at the net relentlessly. But Hornqvist’s taken only 15 shots on the season, one each in the past three games, and yet he appears to be getting only stronger.
And his priority hasn’t changed, either. He’s been the relentless heartbeat of his team since his arrival — a “warrior,” as Sidney Crosby calls him — and he genuinely sounds as if he’d be OK coming home from Western Canada with three wins and a goose egg still stuck to his goal column.
To be sure, Crosby's of the same mindset with the same egg.
“We didn’t have a good start as a team, and we didn’t have a good feeling about it,” Hornqvist told me before walking — not limping or hobbling — to the team bus. “We knew our record was better than the way we played. But that game was a great test for us. Everybody was working hard. Did the small things right.”
Him, too.
MORE FROM PRACTICE
• The session focused on neutral-zone movement, as had been the case in the practices leading up to Toronto. Sullivan and his staff — Jacques Martin actually conducted about half the drills — sound convinced that the Penguins’ fluidity had been badly disrupted between the blue lines. And nothing Thursday, when they were very good in that regard, would have contradicted that.
• Befitting the spirit of the victory the previous night, practice was both uptempo and upbeat. Speed to match the smiles. “Really good workout,” Jamie Oleksiak told me. “I honestly think that the game felt good, that we kind of needed that.”
• Notable from the drills was Evgeni Malkin several times admonishing Phil Kessel to shoot rather than pass. One of those was a vocal, “Shoot!”
• Also notable: Simon and Sprong, both benched for most of the second half of the Toronto game, skated through drills as if their legs were ablaze.
• The Penguins will remain in Canada for the duration of this four-city trip, even though they don’t play again until Tuesday in Edmonton. Saturday is a travel day to Alberta, where they’ll spend three days in the resort town of Banff. They’ll practice in Banff on Sunday and Monday, with Chris Bradford covering for us.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Penguins practice, Toronto, Oct. 19, 2018 - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS